Rennie’s in “a splendid fit of bad temper” due to the selling out conversation she’s just had, in addition to some lingering pique over her interactions with Marcus and Sheriff Lawdog. And she admits she’d take out her anger on anyone who had the bad fortune to stumble across her.
Especially she didn’t want to encounter any artists just now, for fear she’d slap them senseless for faults as yet uncommitted—a little spot of pre-emptive criticism.
The author thinks Rennie’s bad temper and lack of impulse control and penchant toward violence redound to her credit, and seems to think this makes her protagonist sassy and kickass, but it doesn’t. It really doesn’t. It just makes her look like she has all the emotional maturity of a six-year-old.
And then we’re going on AGAIN about bands selling out, even though we just covered that subject thoroughly in the previous chapter. At the END of the previous chapter, in fact. Kennealy-Morrison’s writing is repetitious as all get-out.
She does go on to make a connection about how politics could take a page from this book and the future and turns left at Albuquerque by deciding that this could be a motivation for Cory Rivkin’s murder, although not Amander’s: Owl Tuesday might have had the opportunity to sell song rights for commercial use and some members didn’t want to do that. So that’s a reason for murder? And if it is, then Cory had to be the only member of the group who didn’t want to sell a song, or it wouldn’t have accomplished anything.
But she does come up with a plan of action to try to investigate her hypothesis: find out what rights what band members possessed and who got the money. She does think that the other band members may have killed him. That seems a little involved—all it would take is one. And she pays lip service to the fact that this may not be correct but as Rennie is always right, we know it is. Let’s see if she actually does any of what she’s just proposed. Odds are that the solution to the mystery just plops itself into her lap.
As she should have been able to foresee back at the motel, her “worn sneakers” don’t provide much protection from the wetness and she wants to change her shoes and socks. Fortuitously, she remembers she threw extra shoes and socks in her car and commends herself for this by thinking, “How downright foresighted of her!”
This is example number 381, 755 of the writer protecting her self-insert from the consequences of her actions, no matter how small. I admit it’s nothing next to the incident in chapter 20 of Love Him Madly where Rennie beat up a cop while ripped to the tits on cocaine and not only didn’t get arrested but the beaten-up cop was forced to apologize to her, but it says something about how heavily invested in her self-insert Kennealy-Morrison was if she goes to these lengths to make sure Rennie always has dry feet. It’s not like she’s going to get trench foot for having wet feet for a few hours. Plus, this whole digression about the comfort of Rennie’s feet has not one single solitary thing to do with the plot.
The plot sticks its nose back in by having Lexicographer show up in the performer’s pavilion in time to have a heart-to-heart talk with Rennie, which she never says is off the record. Why doesn’t anybody who talks to Rennie make sure they tell her that this shit is off the record since they all know she’s a reporter?
What security there is tries to keep Lexicographer out, which hurts her feelings, so Rennie has to intervene for a myriad of reasons, chief among these being her need to throw her weight around, get some inside information from the suspect about the murder, and make sure Lexicographer thinks she owes Rennie.
She engages in some behavior designed to disarm Lexicographer, like getting her a shawl to keep her warm and getting her tea, before she lowers the boom. This is Rennie’s usual MO. Please be advised that this heart-to-heart talk takes up almost six pages.
“So,” she said then, and Lexie raised startled guilty eyes, as if she were a scolded puppy, though Rennie’s tone had been light.
I doubt it.
“You might have let me know about it, really. You and Amander, I mean…I need to be told.”
And Lexicographer tells her, “Why the fuck should I? It’s none of your business.”
Yeah, that was actually me. In the actual book, Lexicographer is properly apologetic and rolls over to expose her throat and belly like a defeated dog and spills everything Rennie wants to know “humbly.” Go fuck yourself, Rennie.
And then, because Rennie thinks Amander was a base little slut, we get confirmation for all of this out of Lexicographer. It doesn’t say anything good about Kennealy-Morrison that her books are so full of slut-shaming, especially when most of it originates from her self-insert. And it’s so artless it makes clear that Amander Evans is the analogue for one of Kennealy-Morrison’s vast army of enemies who must be destroyed in fiction because she couldn’t avenge herself on them in real life. I’m quoting the entire villain speech to show the cartoonish, poorly written depiction of Amander-as-mean-slut.
There was no reason for her to throw it in my face like that [my note—Amander’s relationship with Ned Raven], except only to hurt me.
Or to enable the writer to cut down this nameless enemy as a mean-spirited slut, but please do continue.
And then she said we—us—that what we’d had wasn’t any more romantic or real than it had been for her with Ned. That she’d screwed him just to get attention and make trouble and hurt him and his wife, that she got off on it; and that she had hooked up with me for pretty much the same reasons. She said that was why she’d insisted we keep it a secret, so that now she could tell everyone she’d broken up with me because I was such a loser. She actually laughed about it, as if I’d been so stupid to take it seriously.
One way this speech would work is if Lexicographer murdered Amander and is flat-out lying to Rennie about what went on between them because Lexicographer knows how terrified of and paranoid about other women she is and how possessive of Turk. This would be a guaranteed slam-dunk and Rennie would eat up the depiction of Amander.
Another way this could work is if Amander had some personal grudge against Ned and Demelza Poldark-Raven and Lexicographer—say they were at an orgy and her sister died because they wouldn’t summon medical assistance for her—and she wanted to jab at Lexicographer but not give away her revenge plans. But neither of these strategies is likely; it’s far more plausible that Kennealy-Morrison hated this character’s analogue so much that slut-shaming her was so gratifying to the author that this was the only reason it was included.
There’s a bunch more twaddle that doesn’t actually seem to affect anything, except for Rennie to get pissed at the possibility that the Sheriff might have been mean to a murder suspect and Lexicographer explaining away the bruises on her arms (both she and Amander had them) as occurring when she tripped over her cat and fell. Well, that’s a weak fucking excuse, but Amander starts crying and Rennie comforts her, and if Lexicographer is the killer she’s gloating to herself about how easy it is to pull the wool over Murder Chick’s eyes. I so hope she’s the killer now.
The next section is about two and a quarter pages of Rennie and Lexicographer continuing their discussion and Rennie wants to give Lexicographer a Valium! Maybe she drugs people in this series as a means of control, or a means of not having to deal with them when she doesn’t want to, or maybe she wants to get them hooked on drugs because she’s an addict herself and isn’t self-aware enough to know it. Rennie goes on to indulge the woman and talk with her about Turk and offers lodgings at the motel that apparently Lionheart owns half of, despite the huge crowd and lack of housing, and the section ends. None of this section should be here, as it contributes nothing to the plot.
Rennie begins the next section by going to the security trailer to call Turk. She knows she isn’t supposed to be “tying up one of the festival lines with a private phone call,” but she’s sure the people there saw her with the police and will think she’s using the phone for murder-related reasons. I so hate Rennie.
There’s some labored dialogue that does nothing but show Rennie is worried about Turk, but does let us know that she will be staying until Monday to see Jimi Hendrix. The other bands between now and then can go fuck themselves—Rennie’s such a lousy reporter if the Rupert Murdoch analogue wasn’t fellating her about how great she is, she would have been fired literally years ago—and Mary Prax has left the festival, so at least she can’t be so fucking precious for a while.
Rennie fellates Turk about how smart he was to leave the festival, which actually wasn’t his choice due to the fact that HE WAS POISONED, which his true love seems to have put on the back burner. That’s an odd choice for the writer to make, but whatever, because we’re getting to the part where Turk figures out she’s putting herself in danger again and wants her to stop. And he’s right—she has no clues and no suspects, so she should leave the whole business to the police, especially since she hated one of the victims and barely knew the other one. Kennealy-Morrison called these books cozies, which I was wondering about because one of the characteristics of a cozy mystery is that the reader doesn’t give two shits about the murder victim.
I have no idea why Turk thinks Rennie’s going to listen to him about this. They’ve had this conversation multiple times, and she knows this is such a sore spot with him that he broke up with her because he couldn’t deal with the idea of her being hurt or killed, but she’s so spoiled and self-obsessed that there’s no way she’ll do anything other than continue to burnish her Murder Chick reputation.
He quotes the thing Rennie said that gave me Servant series flashbacks about her bathing in blood, and here’s her reaction.
Rennie smiled proudly; she couldn’t help it.
Okay, so she’s a sociopath. Why is the author even pretending that this girl isn’t a nightmare of violence and cruelty and self-indulgence? Why doesn’t the author see that Rennie’s the natural villain of this series?
There’s uninteresting personal talk until Rennie brings up the subject of Niles Clay. How does anybody in that trailer think this is anything other than a personal call based on what she’s been saying?
Turk sucks Rennie’s dick for a longish paragraph about how she’s kept all his “unforgivable” insults to herself and would never, never rat, and finally says he and Niles will “have it out” themselves. I still think his position’s safe, not just because he’s still the lead singer in the next book, but because this band can’t give a halfway competent performance without him. Of course Rennie makes some more violent threats toward Niles, which Turk completely endorses as his balls are in her pocket and have been since the fourth book. Before the end of the conversation, he says the line, “Know your audience,” which Rennie has a big mental reaction to and must be significant, but we won’t get any clues as to why as the writer doesn’t play fair with the readers.
And—chapter! Every chapter is crappier than the one which came before. We’re now four chapters and an epilogue from the end of the book, and we can’t count the last chapter and epilogue because the writer is obsessed with showing us how beautifully things turned out for Rennie, so there’s three chapters to solve the murders.
I should have some concluding thoughts other than how much I hate Rennie, how poor the pacing is, how much I hate all the slut-shaming, how much I hate all of Rennie’s unearned privilege and arrogance, and how sick I am of the world turning itself upside down to accommodate her, but it feels like I’ve been saying that for the entire book up until this point. I almost want to say that I wish Kennealy-Morrison would find some different ways to mess up her books, but then I remember how bad it is now and take the wish back. Anyway, we’re almost done, and on to the worst book in the series, as each book in the series has been that before I read the one which came after.
Next time, chapter 21, during which we find out who the “groupie” with Cory Rivkin was and resolve his murder, while Rennie sticks to her dumbass theory that Amander also died of a peanut allergy for no goddamn reason, and there’s some interaction with Marcus that doesn’t even include him telling her that they don’t have a cause of death for Amander yet so her argument is built on sand.
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